


Not to reason why

by redroslin



Series: The Laura Roslin soul mate AUs [2]
Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, endgame Bill/Laura
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-12-25 13:53:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18262646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redroslin/pseuds/redroslin
Summary: Then there's the one where Laura Roslin and Richard Adar are soul mates.





	Not to reason why

**Author's Note:**

> This'll be the second in what is becoming a series of unrelated, short, Laura Roslin-centric soul mate AUs. It was one of the later plot bunnies (thus the opening line) but the rest were such a mess to write, and this one was so straightforward--being basically canon anyway, and also the fluffiest fluff--that it happened sooner. Whoops.

Then there's the one where Laura Roslin and Richard Adar are soul mates.

I know, I know. Bear with me here.

Laura Roslin is born with two soul marks: a sprawling vine that spreads across her back, and a dagger on the palm of her right hand.

Conventional wisdom on Caprica has it that larger marks--and marks on less, ahem, public parts of the body--stand for loves that are felt more keenly. She hates both marks equally: the vine for looming so large, and the dagger for being so damn obvious to the world.

She doesn't want to meet either of them--not now, and not later. They've already complicated her life more than enough.

But she's curious, all right? She can't help but be curious.

She loses her virginity at 17 to a man who hates her flowering vine mark so much, he mentions it every time they frak. She hates it, too, but she doesn't need the constant reminder from him.

Of its existence. Of _his_ or _her_ existence--her soul mate, the one who's marked her.

She knows the vine seems unnatural, spread across her back in a riot of mismatched wooden branches and trailing green stems. It's bizarre and unwieldy, a hybrid monster of a plant, bearing multicoloured flowers that look vaguely like cosmos blooms. She knows it's ten times the size of the average soul mark (she's done the research, okay?). She knows the grinning skull on her left shoulder blade, with the naked curve of its crown melting into the base of the vine, is kind of horrifying. She knows, all right? What's the point of discussing the damn thing?

She breaks up with her first boyfriend within three months. The dagger, the skull, and its creeping vine stay.

She wears her hair down, always, to conceal the tendrils that climb the back of her neck. She wears high necklines even when they're unfashionable to hide the flowers that creep across her décolletage. So far, she's been fortunate: her work in schools and in public service hasn't put her enough in the public eye for anyone to bother prying into the shadow that clings to her collarbones and reaches for her nape.

Soul mark scandals are so last decade, anyway.

She meets Richard Adar in the flesh on her third day with his campaign, and watches his eyebrows rise as he goes to shake her hand. Unlike most, he doesn't comment on the little dagger. Also unlike most, she notes as he draws away, he bears a filigree sword on the inside of his left wrist.

The sword is longer, and the lines of it deeper and heavier, but it could otherwise be the twin of her fine-hewn dagger.

Her palm pricks with pins and needles for half an hour after contact with his.

Maybe, she muses, she should have paid more attention to those celebrity soul marks after all.

After that, she never sees Adar in anything but full sleeves with elaborate cufflinks, but she knows what she saw--and she knows that he knows.

Richard Adar has a soul mark that matches hers.

Richard Adar has a marriage of nearly thirty years to his high school sweetheart, who is widely known to be his soul mate. He has two teenaged children and a well-earned reputation for honesty and integrity.

Richard Adar is running for Mayor of Caprica City--is Mayor of Caprica City--is running for President of the Twelve Colonies--

Richard Adar, President of the Twelve Colonies, would never cheat.

Their affair is years in the making. Years in which she becomes his right hand woman, his invisible task force of one. She handles Adar's unsightly messes and unnameable problems. She makes herself irreplaceable to him not because she's good at her job--though she is--but because it's more natural than breathing for her to want to be there for him, support him, be with him.

It's inevitable, and impossible.

They talk about the soul marks only once, weeks into his second campaign, on a quiet bus in the dead of night when the rest of the team are asleep.

He knows she's his soul mate. She knows he's hers. They each have another soul mark, his connecting him to Leia Adar and hers to some unknown (and possibly unhinged) stranger she may or may not ever meet.

She loves him--she thinks--but he won't leave Leia, and he won't cheat, and with her family gone these past two years she doesn't feel much of anything except for him.

They're in a holding pattern and it's... it's fine.

He breaks eventually. It's the same old story: there's a fight with his wife, a few drinks, a well-cut skirt. She breaks a heel, or maybe runs a stocking--what does it matter? They sleep together in a moment of weakness and once's the dam broken, it's all too easy to do it again. And again.

He never comments on her other soul mark. She barely lets her eyes land on his.

(His other soul mark is a black orchid, exquisite and elegant. From the corner of her eye, sometimes, Laura thinks that it looks like a woman, her head bowed in prayer or in grief. She hates the way she feels when she looks at it, so she doesn't look.)

Time passes. The Colonies end.

It occurs to her, in the wake of her lost election--at the end of her inherited term as President, inherited from her lover and soul mate she can never claim--that the skull on her shoulder might well stand for either the death of the Colonies, or her own medical death sentence. If it's true--if either of those possibilities is the truth--then her soul mate  must be someone she's met since, must be a relationship sprung from the death of her old life and grown into something unexpected and new.

She can think of a few people who fit that description: Billy. Apollo. Even Tory. She knows it's none of them.

She can't bear to think further down the list than that.

He carries too many people's hopes already; she won't set more burdens on him.

She won't.

She doesn't think about her marks.

She wears her hair down, always. Her signature style features the sort of fashionably high necklines that are to be expected from a sitting or former President in middle age.

No one comments.

A few months after the election, there is a groundbreaking ceremony on New Caprica. There's a party afterward, and she drinks a bit more than she meant to and winds up on a hill somewhere, smoking with him.

Which him, you ask? Don't be coy with me. There's only one him for Laura.

(Once there were two, but the Colonies burned, and Richard Adar is dead and gone.)

The sun is going down, and the sky is hazy with twilight and the cold. She leans into him and it feels more natural than breathing when he puts his arm around her.

They lie there talking all night about nothing and everything, like teenagers, like kids. She feels safe with him. It's more than she could ever have asked and less than she wants it to be.

The Cylons find them, of course.

She doesn't see him for most of a year and when she does, it's different. She doesn't trust herself around him. She can't justify any of it any more--not to herself and not to Tory, who watches and sees everything, far more than Billy ever did.

She draws back. She moves forward. She flirts. He flirts back. She draws away again.

When she finally finds her way into his bed it's explosive and immediate. One minute they're drinking tea in his sitting-room-cum-office as they do every week, buttoned up and proper, the length of the couch between them; in the next she's in his lap and shedding her jacket and they're fucking each other's mouths with hot, eager tongues and it's everything, everything, why haven't they been doing this all along, she's never going to stop, damn the fleet anyway.

She reaches for the clips on the front of his jacket but he pauses and pulls her hands away.

"Laura. Are you sure?"

She shoots him a look, tugging her hands free from his hold. "Yes."

"Don't. It's a reasonable question. Once we do this, we can't go back."

"Could we ever?"

Now he's the one giving her a reproachful look. "Back to the Colonies, back to fighting with each other, or back to pretending neither of us wants more?"

"Hmmm," she muses. "You forgot one. Back to pretending I'm unaware that I have your mark on me."

She starts shaking after she's said it--only a little, but enough that he can't help but notice. He lays his hands on her shoulders and they're big and warm and comforting, and so damn close to the mark he doesn't know is there. She shivers and leans into him.

"Oh." He wraps his arms around her and says, into her ear, "I thought it was just me."

"What?"

"Your mark. On me."

She shouldn't be startled, but she is. "My mark? What--"

"I can show you, if you want."

She's nodding before she registers it. "Please."

When he strips off his jacket and then his shirt, she pulls back for a moment in surprise: He's littered with marks, or so it seems at first. Soul marks pepper his chest, a welter of colours and symbols, each an inch or two wide, bisected by the scar that runs down his sternum.

He has loved so many people, she thinks, more than a little astonished. So many, and so deeply, every one of them hidden beneath his clothes, held close to his heart.

She meets his eyes, and he stares back at her--a little combative, but unashamed.

"Who are they?" she asks softly, reaching out to touch the one over his heart. It's a book, cracked brown leather cover split open to reveal a red heart so bright it seems almost to be beating with each breath he takes.

It's beautiful, and she slides her fingers over it reverently, still awed at the sheer number of his marks. He gasps at her touch and takes her hand in his, drawing it away from his body but still holding her close.

"Most are platonic," he admits.

"Saul," she guesses.

"Not that one." With the hand not holding hers, he points instead to a grey shield on the right side of his ribcage. It looks like it belongs to an old suit of armour, dented and worn from ancient wars.

"How fitting," she murmurs.

"This one's Kara," he says, touching a smear of paint--red, yellow, blue--on his left bicep.

Her eyebrows shoot up in surprise. Upon closer inspection, the paint resolves itself into a messy handprint, like a child's finger painting. She wants to touch it but refrains.

"Childhood friends," he says, pointing to a small bird and a tiger on his hip. A series of tiny Colonial vipers across his breastbone and stomach are, "Other pilots I trained and served with."

She nods, wanting to touch them all--to touch all of him.

"The other two are my ex-wife, Carolanne," he points to a delicate gold ring that marks the upper curve of his right pectoral, sweetly classic and obviously a wedding band. "And you."

The book, with its too-vivid beating heart.

"That's me?"

He smiles and it lights his careworn face. "Yes."

"Oh."

With careful fingers, she reaches for it again, itching to touch this evidence--of what? Of her existence? (Is she more real for having marked two men's skin?)

She meets his eyes and waits, this time, until he nods. The book is warm to the touch, from more than the heat of his skin. _Gods_.

"It's beautiful, Bill. Thank you."

His eyebrows shoot up in amusement. "You're welcome."

She laughs at herself, and he smiles, and she doesn't want the moment to end.

"...I suppose I should show you mine," she says eventually.

"I'd like that."

"I only have two."

" _Only_ two," he says, teasingly.

"Mhmm. Only two."

She extends her right hand matter-of-factly, palm up. He takes it equally prosaically; of course he's seen the dagger before. Everyone has.

"This one isn't yours," she says. She tries to imagine not telling him, letting him go on thinking better of her than she deserves, and she can't do it. "It's Richard Adar's."

Now his eyebrows rise. "I hadn't realized."

She nods. "It isn't something I'm proud of."

"I thought he was married to his soul mate."

"He was. His other soul mate."

"I'm sorry," he says, and she hears no judgment, no censure in his tone--only compassion.

"Thank you." There's more she wants to say but--not right now.

This is hard enough as it is.

She slides out of his lap and immediately misses the warmth, the solidity, of his body beneath her. In a cowardly move, she turns her back before she shrugs out of her blouse. The rustle of fabric disguises any sound he might have made--did he inhale in surprise? Did he shift impatiently? She doesn't know.

"This one's yours," she says, and holds her breath and waits.

"Can I...?"

She exhales. "Sure."

A touch, more hesitant than she expected. He strokes the skull's outline with a fingertip, warm and sure, then draws what must be one of the eight-petaled blooms. She feels him trace the vine where it passes down her spine, across her shoulders, up her neck. She shivers.

She wants his hands on her so much. She wants his hands everywhere.

"It's amazing," he says at last. "You're amazing."

She turns in his arms so she can look him in the eye. "I hated it for a long time. I hated _you_."

"I know," he says, far too satisfied with himself. "And now you don't."

"And now I don't," she agrees.


End file.
